Cobb crime stable from year to year

There was little difference between the number of crimes recorded in Cobb County in 2008 and the number reported the year before, according to statistics provided by the police department.

Mickey Lloyd, Cobb’s public safety director, said the changes in the numbers, up or down, are hardly noticeable. The Cobb County Police Department, which reports to Lloyd, is trying programs to target problem areas and to get residents to report more suspicious activity.

“If people want to steal, they’ll steal. And there are a lot of things we can’t control. A lot of it [crime fighting] is reactive,” Lloyd said.

“We just have to be proactive and see trends through our analysis.”

In 2008, there were 14,406 cases reported in Cobb County that fell into one of the eight major crime categories reported to the FBI. In 2007, there were 14,322, or 84 fewer.

“When you have a difference of 84 cases out of 14,000, that’s basically noise. That’s not changing the quality of the numbers,” said Robert Friedmann, a criminologist at Georgia State University. “From a statistics perspective, the numbers are the same.”

The drop in 2008 was in violent crime categories; there were 1,338 homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults reported in 2007 and 1,164 recorded last year.

Burglaries, larcenies, car thefts and arsons kept the county from seeing an overall drop, though the increase was slight. Police recorded 13,293 property crimes last year and 11,438 the year before.

In Atlanta, for example, raw numbers suggest overall crime will be up 4 to 5 percent, driven by burglaries and thefts from cars. DeKalb County, on the other hand, saw an overall 3 percent decline, mostly because of sharp drops in the numbers of aggravated assaults and larcenies.

“Property crimes are up partly because people are desperate,” Lloyd said. “Another reason is the types of things people have.”

Cellphones, laptop computers and portable GPS systems are easy targets.

“They leave them in their cars,” Lloyd said.

The Cobb Police Department created a special unit 15 months ago that is dispatched to high-crime areas. The department says that team —- the Violent Incident Prevention and Early Response Unit —- contributed to the decline in homicides by three.

“If you take credit now, when [crime] goes down, will you take the credit when it goes up?” Friedmann said. “A community is fortunate if it has a dedicated police force that is fighting crime. At the same time, it’s important to understand [that] combating crime is not only the responsibility of the police. What generates crime are factors beyond their control. Citizens should not expect the police to be the crime controllers in their community because they [police] are not producing crime and expectations that they will curb it” are “unrealistic.”

COBB NUMBERS

Here are year-end figures from the department, which polices Cobb outside the limits of the county’s six cities.

Crime …………2007 ….2008

Homicide…………21 ……18

Rape…………….98 ……94

Robbery…………637 …..559

Aggravated assault 582 …..493

Burglary ……..3,144….3,507

Larceny……….8,068….8,232

Arson …………..55 ……59

Auto theft ……1,717….1,444